Abstract
In this essay I link Giovanni Arrighi's world-historical framework in The Long Twentieth Centuryto debates about the "cultural turn" in global capitalism since the 1970s. I do so primarilythrough interrogation of the writings of one of the major figures in such debates: FredricJameson. In his Jameson's engagementwithArrighi's, he emphasizes the determinative influenceof finance capital on an expansion in the degree of cultural abstraction and fragmentation that isemblematic of the post-modern condition. Building on this linkage, I extend and elaborateArrighi's analysis of historical capitalism's cycles of accumulation, in which periods of materialexpansion give way to phases of financial expansion and accelerated restructuring of theorganizational and institutional foundations of the world-economy. I conclude that Jameson'sassertion of a link between the financialization of the world economy and post-modern culturalforms is best understand as a correlative rather than a causal relationship, for the growingsalience of finance capital and the new forms and degree of cultural abstraction are themselvesboth dimensions of the more fundamental socio-economic restructuring attending a period offinancial expansion.
Highlights
My aim in this essay is to explore the possibilities for a creative synthesis between the worldhistorical economic sociology pioneered by Giovanni Arrighi ( 1994, 2007; Arrighi and Silver 1999) and the post-structuralist concern with the "cultural tum" in the history of global capitalism since the 1970s
Even in the wake of a hyperbolic decade in which the "new economy" discourse came and went, pronouncements of the unique, historically unprecedented or epoch-making transformations in culture, commerce and society are not hard to come by. This is a path worth following because of the truism that we live in an age of "informational" or "cultural" capitalism (Bell 1973; Castells 2000a; DeBord 1995 [ 1967]; Lash and Urry 1987, 1994; Poster 1990; Webster 2002) - even if this claim is more than worthy of interrogation in its own right
The model I have advanced toward this end begins from Jameson's rather nebulous linking of fmance capital (Arrighi's financialization) to a "cultural tum" within the socio-economic sphere
Summary
My aim in this essay is to explore the possibilities for a creative synthesis between the worldhistorical economic sociology pioneered by Giovanni Arrighi ( 1994, 2007; Arrighi and Silver 1999) and the post-structuralist concern with the "cultural tum" in the history of global capitalism since the 1970s. Even in the wake of a hyperbolic decade in which the "new economy" discourse came and went, pronouncements of the unique, historically unprecedented or epoch-making transformations in culture, commerce and society are not hard to come by This is a path worth following because of the truism that we live in an age of "informational" or "cultural" capitalism (Bell 1973; Castells 2000a; DeBord 1995 [ 1967]; Lash and Urry 1987, 1994; Poster 1990; Webster 2002) - even if this claim is more than worthy of interrogation in its own right. It is within these dynamics that the forces impacting commercialized cultural production are generated, institutionalized within particular organizational arrangements, and transformed as well
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